Perhaps one of the best records of the tides of history is tracking local food. The insight is not new -- Alfred Crosby, the late expert on environmental history, wrote in the 1970s about migration of crops and animals from the American New World to the Eurasian Old World. But it hit me with peculiar force in 2018 as I sat in a restaurant in Kazan, Russia.
Flicking through the menu for a local specialty, but balking at foal ribs, I settled on uchpuchmak. What appeared before me was unmistakably a samosa. Sure, the filling was more savory than the Indian variant, and the casing breadier, but there was no mistaking the distinctive triangular pocket of filled and fried dough. Sitting on a plate was a contemporary trace of those great Central Asian migrations that spilled as far north as Russia and as far south as India.
